File server structure and best practices (mainly ZFS)

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PointandClick

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 6, 2008
Messages
383
Alright so I'm in the process of cleaning up my ZFS server. Currently I have home directory's shared out and then one "Media" share where everything else tends to get dumped.

First off, I'm curious what approach everyone else takes to structuring their directory's.
My thoughts were breaking it down into something like this:

/Media - Actual media, Movies, Music, TV Shows, etc
/Software
/Virtual Machines
/Misc
/etc

What sort of subdirectories do you use?


Secondly, pertaining to ZFS, how do you implement datasets? My understanding is that each dataset is like a partition, so any copying between them results in a read and write. I assume this is true even if two datasets are children of the same parent dataset?

If this is the case it seems like the best implementation would be to have a single dataset containing the structure above and use ACL's to restrict access to each share. Thoughts?
 
Correct. Moving something from one dataset to another requires a copy. It's a tradeoff. If there is no policy difference between two or more directories (e.g. compression, sharing, etc), just make them subdirs.
 
Seems good, only advise on structure is that you have them the way you did it so you can set attribute separatly on different kind of data.

i.e sync/async write (I have VMsync and VMasync, async much faster, but for a DB vm I prefer the protection so it's on sync.

Also auto snapshot work that way, try to split data that you don't want to auto snap. (i.e I use my setup for DVR, i record, watch, erase).
 
The thought occurred to me that if I wanted to use NFS in the future that it might be better to have separate datasets since sharing is per dataset. I suppose with NFSv4 this wouldn't be as big of an issue since it moves to user based authentication rather than host if I understand correctly.

Plus as you mention, all the nifty ZFS tidbits like snapshots and compression are per dataset.

Is it possible to hide folders that a user does not have permission to access from showing up. Specifically in regards to AFP and CIFS.
 
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